Does anyone besides me think Vonage is actually a rip-off?

Vonage or any Voip pays for itself only if you call Europe and the US lot! you can call 5 European countries for free...and all over US...so if you have high speed or DSL anyway yes you will save...I don't have Vonage, but I do have clear-wire high-speed for 19.99 a month and Voip for 19.99 a month...

Voip is a great way to save money. I use to have verizon phone service. My monthly phone bill would be anwhere between 60 and a 100 dollars a month. Limited features. I could not pick a la carte which features i wanted which was a pain too. Not to mention that a third of my bill was mostly taxes and fees.....what a ripoff. So i switched to att call vantage. For 29.99 plus about 2 dollars in tax i get to call anwhere in the US and Canada and Every feature invented pretty much included. The service is very reliable..no major outages or problems. Sure you need high speed or dsl to have viop....but most households are already paying for that existing service in there home already. I mean hell dsl costs about 20 bucks a month. So for a grand total of 20 bucks for dsl and 32 bucks for call vantage you have both....not bad at all.

Here's a situation where I save over $30 per month: I have a home business with both a voice line and fax line. I also have good-old POTS from SBC (AT&T) with their DSL for my personal phone number - which works fine. I did not want to give up my POTS personal line.

But I was sick and tired of paying SBC for two additional phone lines with minimal features - and my usage was not very high. I was able to transfer my existing phone numbers to Vonage, get more features and reduce my bill.

So the issue is not giving up POTS, but using a provider like Vonage for different applications.

there is ups and downs to both VOIP and POTS lines.

A POTS line maybe a little morre expensive. But they are reliable.

VOIP has a lot of problems to work out before they are practical for residential service

They have worked out really well so far for me. There isnt much usage on my home phone for me though- I use the cell phone usually. The bill is right though- cheap enough.